Thursday, August 13, 2015

Review: Kunkel's 'Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell Of The New Yorker'

WHEN THE NEW JOURNALISTS CAME ASHORE, JOE MITCHELL WAS THERE TO GREET THEM. ~ JOHN McPHEE

Sadly, upon his death in 1996 at age 87,
Joseph Quincy Mitchell was less known for his extraordinarily elegant writing in The New Yorker than his
decades-long case of writers block.

Mitchell, who died in 1996 at age 87 after a 48-year career at The New Yorker,
is arguably the patron saint of literary journalism, or long-form
journalism, as I prefer to call it, as well as New Journalism, a
term Mitchell loathed, never mind that the genre has bequeathed us
Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Hunter S. Thompson, among
other ink-stained greats.

Like
the characters whom Mitchell profiled, from an eccentric misfit by the
name of Joe Gould to the bearded Lady Olga to Louie Morino, a
contemplative restaurateur, he was a character himself. Thomas Kunkel
lovingly relates this in A Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, a first-rate biography made better still because of its emphasis on Mitchell's
writing with its Joycean (and he loved James Joyce) layers of detail,
precisely rendered dialogue, poetic rhythms and imaginative leaps. Mitchell called his prose "wild exactitude."

Mitchell covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial while reporting for the New York World-Telegram and later did celebrity profiles for The New Yorker, but preferred simpler folk. While his good friend and fellow New Yorker great A.J. Liebling called his subjects "characters," Mitchell drew deeply empathetic portraits of his own subjects, and no matter
how freakish these bums, street preachers, grifters and leeches
sometimes were, he was often funny but never condescended or pandered.

From his profile of Lady Olga:

Her thick, curly beard measures thirteen and a half inches, which is the
longest it has ever been. When she was young and more entranced by life
under canvas, she wore it differently every year; in those days there
was a variety of style in beards -- she remembers the Icicle, the Indian
Fighter, the Whisk Broom, and the Billy Goat -- and at the beginning of a
season she would ask the circus barber to trim hers in the style most
popular at the moment. Since it became gray, she has worn it in the
untrimmed, House of David fashion.

We
meet Louie Morino in "Up in the Old Hotel" (from which my favorite
Mitchell anthology
took its name). The wordly-wise Louie runs Sloppy Louie's, a seafood
restaurant in former hotel in a rundown old
building on South Street in the Fulton Fish Market. Louie bemoans the
passing of the time when only fishmongers came into his restaurant. Now
well-heeled businesspeople crowd the joint and he reluctantly puts
tables
on the second floor, but it's still too crowded.

"I got to
make room someway,” Louie says.

"That ought to be easy," Mitchell replies. "You've got four empty floors up above." But it isn't easy because you have to ride a decrepit, uninspected elevator that has to be pulled up by
hand and Louie has never worked up the courage to use the elevator in the 22 years he has rented the building:

I just don’t want to
get in that cage by myself. I got a feeling about it, and that's the
fact of the matter. It makes me uneasy -- all closed in, and all that furry
dust. It makes me think of a coffin, the inside of a coffin. Either
that or a cave, the mouth of a cave. If I could get somebody to go along
with me, somebody to talk to, just so I wouldn’t be all alone in there,
I'd go.

Mitchell, of course, goes and in an empty hotel
bedroom at the rear of the third floor is a placard tacked to the wall saying
"The
Wages of Sin is Death; but the Gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus
Christ our Lord." Louie has had enough. Mitchell wants to go up to the
other floors, but Louie says no. "There’s nothing up there."

Back in the elevator, writes Mitchell:

Louie was
leaning against the side of the cage, and his shoulders were slumped and
his eyes were tired. "I didn't learn much I didn't know before," he
said.

"You learned that the wages of sin is death," I said, trying to say something cheerful.

Mitchell's last and most famous piece was "Joe Gould's Secret," which was published in 1964.

Gould
lived on handouts, was famous for
doing seagull imitations at parties, but best known for a massive,
multi-volume compendium called the Oral History
of Our Time, which Mitchell wrote about at length in a 1942 profile. When he
returned to the subject in a 1964 profile, he revealed Gould was a fraud
and Oral History
did not exist. But Mitchell not only
forgives Gould after berating him for his lie, he
confesses that he is guilty of the same thing.

I
have always deeply disliked seeing anyone shown up or found out or
caught in a lie or caught red-handed doing anything, and now, with time
to think things over, I began to feel ashamed of myself for the way I
had lost my temper and pounced on Gould. . . .

He very likely went around
believing in some hazy, self-deceiving, self-protecting way that the
Oral History did exist . . . It might not exactly be down on paper, but he
had it all in his head, and any day now he was going to start getting it
down.

It was easy for me to see how this could be, for it reminded me of a novel that I
had once intended to write . . . under the spell of
Joyce's Ulysses.

The book was to be about New York City and tell the story of a young reporter from the
South like himself who was no longer a practicing Baptist but is still inclined to
see things in religious terms, and whose early exposure to
fundamentalist evangelists has

left him with a lasting liking for the cryptic and the
ambiguous and the incantatory and the disconnected and the extravagant
and the oracular and the apocalyptic. I had thought about this novel
for over a year. Whenever I had nothing else to do, I would
automatically start writing it in my mind. . . . But the truth is, I never
actually wrote a word of it.

Years later, long after Mitchell stopped publishing, he was asked why he found Gould so interesting.

"Because he is me,"
Mitchell replied.

Kunkel explores in depth what was something of an open secret in Mitchell's lifetime: He used composites and invented figures, an acceptable practice for feature writers of an earlier time if not exactly kosher today.

Mitchell's famous character of the elderly and eccentric Mr.
Hugh G. Flood, who appears in three of his stories, was a composite, and Mitchell admitted as much when the Flood stories were republished in book form in 1948.

There were other fabrications: Cockeye Johnny
Nikanov, the self-styled King of the Gypsies, and Orvis Diabo, the
main subject of a piece about the
Mohawk Indian steelworkers who work high atop skyscrapers and bridges.

Kunkel never quite solves the mystery of why Mitchell went into his office at The New Yorker one
day in 1964, shut the door and sat at his desk, and did so practically
every day for the next 32 years without publishing a
single word, perhaps the most famous case of writer's block in literary
history. But Kunkel suggests that as Mitchell's powers declined with
age, with the death of his beloved wife and soulmate Therese and then
his father, his increased responsibilities elsewhere, his demands on
himself as a journalist never diminished and ultimately crushed his
ability to write.

Joseph Mitchell had a cult-like following, but was a seemingly elusive figure. But Kunkel gets it exactly right when he says that Mitchell was and remains most clearly visible in his own writing.

​A FOOTNOTE

Jill LePore, writing in a recent issue of The New Yorker, reveals that she tracked down several journals and other fragments
written by Joe Gould, more or less debunking Joseph Mitchell's notion
that Oral History was not entirely in his imagination.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.